is fairly endowed; and having some small means of
his own, he lives comfortably. I will add that
he is a thoroughly kindly man, and very conscientious
in the discharge of what he conceives to be his duty.
He has a great many services on Sunday, somewhat sparsely
attended. He reads matins and vespers every day
in his church, and gives an address on saints’
days. But he seems to have no idea what his parishioners
are doing or thinking about, and no particular desire
to know. He is assiduous in visiting, in holding
classes, in teaching; he has no sense of humour whatever;
and the system of religion which he administers is
so perfectly obvious and unquestioned a thing to him,
that it never occurs to him to wonder if other people
are not built on different lines. I have often,
attended his church and heard him preach; but the sermons
which I have heard are either expositions of high doctrine,
or else discourses of what I can only call a very
feminine and even finicking kind of morality; he preaches
on the duty of church-going, on the profane use of
scriptural language, on the sanctification of joy,
on the advisability of family prayer, on religious
meditation, on the examples of saints, on the privilege
of devotional exercises, on the consecration of life,
on the communion of saints, on the ministry of angels.
But it seems all remote from daily life, and to be
a species of religion that can only be successfully
cultivated by people of abundant leisure. I do
not mean to say that many of these things do not possess
a certain refined beauty of their own; but I do feel
that farmers and labourers are not, as a rule, in
the stage in which such ideas are possible or even
desirable. I have seen him conduct a children’s
service, and then he is in high content, surrounded
by clean and well-brushed infants, and smiling girls.
He sits in a chair on the chancel steps, in a paternal
attitude, and leads them in a little meditation on
the childhood of the Mother of Christ. Whenever
he describes a scene out of the Bible, and he is fond
of doing this, it always sounds as if he were describing
a stained-glass window; his favourite qualities are
meekness, submissiveness, devotion, holiness; and
he is apt to illustrate his teaching by the example
of the Apostles, whom we are to believe were men of
singular modesty because we hear so very little about
them. The modern world has no existence for him
whatever; and yet one cannot say that he lives in the
Middle Ages, because he knows so little about them;
he moves in a paradise of cloistered virgins and mild
saints; and the virtue that he chiefly extols is the
virtue of faith; the more that reason revolts at a
statement, the greater is the triumph of godly faith
involved in accepting it unquestioned.
The result is that the little girls love him, the boys laugh at him, the women admire him, the men regard him as not quite a man. The only objects for which he raises money diligently are additions to the furniture of the church; he takes a languid interest in foreign missions, he mistrusts science, and social questions he frankly dislikes. I have heard him say, with an air of deep conviction, when the question of the unemployed is raised, “After all, we must remember that the only possible solution of these sad difficulties is a spiritual one.”